Bernie Sanders Has ‘Nothing Polite to Say’ After Donald Trump Win

Bernie Sanders Image by Getty Images

By Daniel J. Solomon November 10, 2016

Bernie Sanders set aside his grievances with Hillary Clinton during the general election, crisscrossing the nation on behalf of his ex-primary rival. He’s keeping his silence, though, in the wake of President-elect Donald Trump’s victory in the November election.

“We have nothing polite to say,” Sanders adviser told CNN’s Jeff Zeleny on Wednesday, refusing to comment on the race’s outcome.

It wasn’t clear if Bernie is stewing over Trump’s shocking win — or his belief that Hillary Clinton was a seriously flawed candidate.

After Clinton’s stunning defeat, Sanders’ primary boosters started to grumble that he would have carried the blue-collar, Midwestern states that Clinton lost to Trump.

Those complaints were in part a response to earlier claims that Clinton would be more electable than Sanders, which led the Democratic establishment to actively help her secure the nomination against her underdog challenger.

Ben Norton, a politics reporter at Salon, captured that mood in a Twitter post, writing, “hate to say we told you so, but Bernie Sanders warned the Democratic Party, and it didn’t listen; it sabotaged him.”

He attached a link to a June op-ed that Sanders wrote for the New York Times in the wake of Brexit, the vote that Britain to leave the European Union over concerns about immigration and which many have argued foreshadowed Trump’s success.

In that op-ed, titled “Democrats Need to Wake Up,” Sanders warned that America could see the victory of a similar ethnonationalist populism.

To prevent such an outcome, he counseled, “In this pivotal moment, the Democratic Party and a new Democratic president need to make clear that we stand with those who are struggling and who have been left behind. We must create national and global economies that work for all, not just a handful of billionaires.”

Contact Daniel J. Solomon at solomon@forward.com or on Twitter @DanielJSolomon

Daniel J. Solomon is the former Assistant to the Editor/News Writer at the Forward. Originally from Queens, he attended Harvard as an undergraduate, where he wrote his senior thesis on French-Jewish intellectual history. He is excited to have returned to New York after his time in Massachusetts. Daniel’s passions include folk music, cycling, and pointed argument.

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